Pulsar Timing Probes of Primordial Black Holes and Subhalos

Abstract

Pulsars act as accurate clocks, sensitive to gravitational redshift and acceleration induced by transiting clumps of matter. We study the sensitivity of pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) to single transiting compact objects, focusing on primordial black holes and compact subhalos in the mass range from $10^{-12}{M}_{\odot }$ to well above $100M_{\odot }$. We find that the Square Kilometer Array can constrain such objects to be a subdominant component of the dark matter over this entire mass range, with sensitivity to a dark matter sub-component reaching the sub-percent level over significant parts of this range. We also find that PTAs offer an opportunity to probe substantially less dense objects than lensing because of the large effective radius over which such objects can be observed, and we quantify the subhalo concentration parameters which can be constrained.

18 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Limits on the Macho Content of the Galactic Halo from the EROS-2 Survey of the Magellanic Clouds
• Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves
• Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays
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• Non-thermal Histories and Implications for Structure Formation
• Axion minicluster power spectrum and mass function
• Pulsar timing can constrain primordial black holes in the LIGO mass window
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• Miniclusters in the Axiverse
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Probing Dark Low-mass Halos and Primordial Black Holes with Frequency-dependent Gravitational Lensing Dispersions of Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational waves from dark matter isocurvature
• Imprints of the Early Universe on Axion Dark Matter Substructure
• Breaking a dark degeneracy: The gamma-ray signature of early matter domination
• The Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Astronomer
• Ultracompact minihalos associated with stellar-mass primordial black holes
• The Milky Way, Coming into Focus: Precision Astrometry Probes its Evolution, and its Dark Matter
• Orbital scattering by random interactions with extended substructures
• Detecting Gravitational Scattering of Interstellar Objects Using Pulsar Timing
• Gravitational Waves, Extreme Astrophysics, and Fundamental Physics with Precision Pulsar Timing